“Life will break you.Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either. For solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love.You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

Louise Erdrich (The Painted Drum)

zayik, habibti?

al hamdullilah.

i am not ready for ramadan.  cairo of course is bustling.  as it always is.  plastic toys from china that light up, or make music, or scamper, or all three, are abundant on the streets and in the shops.  i can’t help but let aza buy some.

aza was sick for the past few days with fever, diarrhea and puking, and so was cal.  so we moved ourselves into a motel that has the advantage of airconditioning.  it has been wavering between 36 and 40 degrees for the past few days.  which is normal, but miserable, in our stuffy apartment with faded walls and surrounded by too many other apartments suffering from the same maladies.  a few hours in the motel room and we all were feeling better.

i hope to fast, but first i must deal with some more immediate physical issues.

what i truly yearn for this month is renewal.  for my body, my mind, my spirit.  i feel overwhelmed and i know it is what we do that matters, what we practice that matters day after day.  and i want to go through my life, piece by piece, and ask, do i need this?  who does this serve?  what am i doing?  and whose liberation is it supporting?

i see myself forming all of these instantaneous opinions based upon little else than my own ego.  my need to be right.  to win.  to conquer.

i want to stop assuming that people are flat, two dimensional, unless proven otherwise.  i want to let people, situations, beings be infinitely complex–as default.

i want to be able to live out that everyone’s heart is broken.  no one gets through life without a broken heart.  whether it was done all at once or day by day, year by year.  and so when someone acts, positively or negatively, we can know, i can know, that they are acting from a broken heart.

whether they are using the shards of that heart as a knife to hurt others.  or letting love flow through the cracks and out into the universe.

with love,

mai’a